Amazon and the Perils of Non-Disclosure

At one point in my piece on Amazon and the book world in this week’s issue of the magazine, a former employee describes a fellow new hire who had come to the company from the N.S.A. He wondered how she would fit in: “It took me a few weeks. She was going to fit in a lot better than I was.” It took me at least a few weeks to realize that writing about these two worlds—Amazon and publishing—and their fraught, complicated relationship was going to be a reporting challenge not that much easier than covering national security and intelligence.

To some degree, secrecy prevails in all American corporations, and in large institutions generally. No one at these places wants to get caught saying the wrong thing. A gaffe (famously defined by Michael Kinsley as inadvertently telling the truth) is more likely to get you fired than dishonesty, deception, or any number of other ethical breaches. And this situation keeps getting worse, as any reporter who has had to negotiate ground rules with phrases like “on background with quote approval” knows all too well. It was a great relief to read Will Blythe’s Times Op-Ed about refusing to sign a termination agreement after being fired from the digital publisher Byliner because it would have prohibited him from saying anything disparaging about the company. The inexorable inflation of ground rules, non-disclosure agreements, and other impediments to speaking and writing can only be stopped when people refuse to go along with them.

I was naïve about tech companies until I started reporting on them. They turn out to be at least as closed as companies in other industries. This seems backwards—aren’t they filled with hardcore libertarians who want an end to privacy as we’ve known it, a more open and connected world? Apparently for everyone except themselves. And perhaps a sector that monetizes information is more likely to become obsessed with protecting it than if the product were oil or cars. But even in this atmosphere, Amazon is reflexively, absurdly secretive—only giving the absolute minimum information required by law or P.R. In response to a host of fact-checking questions, many of the company’s answers were along the lines of “We don’t break out that number externally,” “We do not share Kindle sales figures,” and “As a general practice, we don’t discuss our business practices with publishers or other suppliers.”

My on-the-record interviews were polite, useful, and always carefully on message in a way that was understandable but not always helpful to Amazon’s cause. If a source says that it’s raining when the air is dry, it doesn’t put the company in the most favorable light. Off the record, employees refused to answer my e-mails, even when I wrote to their personal addresses. (I’ve come to assume that anything sent to @amazon.com, like @state.gov, is going to be read by a higher-up.) This wasn’t universally true, and I was grateful to the Amazonians, former and current, who were willing to talk to me without permission. But they were the rare and brave exceptions, and the extreme reticence of the majority was no doubt an accurate read of their employer’s attitude toward unauthorized disclosures. Dealing with Amazon gave me renewed respect for Brad Stone, whose “The Everything Store” made serious inroads into this corporate fortress.

From Amazon’s point of view, there might be nothing to be gained from greater openness, other than mollifying critics—and who cares about them? Amazon’s share price continues to excel while the company releases only the numbers required of it by the S.E.C. But I would argue that a culture of secrecy is bound to end up harming the institution itself, especially when it’s firmly under the control of one leader, as Amazon is under Jeff Bezos. Without some permeability to the outside world, groupthink takes over, bad habits become entrenched, and a company, like a government, is slow to recognize problems that are apparent to everyone else. I saw this happening with American officials in Iraq, holed up in the Embassy in the middle of the Green Zone and beguiled by their own data points while the country outside spiraled down in flames.

To Amazon, any piece of information could give its competitors an advantage. But what if those competitors’ main advantage is the walled-off, impenetrable nature of the company? If Amazon were just selling clothes, this might not be a potentially fatal flaw. But, as I wrote, the company has become a book publisher and a production company, and its owner has bought a major newspaper. Amazon is up to its neck in the world of culture, where nothing good can be done without a little light and air. The fact that Bezos visited his newspaper last month with more stealth than George W. Bush flying into Baghdad—a visit that was so well hidden even from people at the famously wide-open Post that I managed to break the story in these pages—struck me as particularly bizarre. Why not just show up? Because secrecy is in Amazon’s marrow. I’m certain that, sooner or later, this is going to create problems for Bezos’s newspaper, and I’m fairly sure that one reason for the failure of Amazon’s trade-publishing arm has to do with its isolation from the larger publishing world. If editors can’t gossip, speak to reporters, and pick up intel, they’re less likely to spot new talent and incubate ideas. They’re also less likely to be trusted by writers. Book culture and non-disclosure agreements are inimical.

Which leads to the other half of the relationship discussed in my piece—the New York publishing world. No, it wasn’t easy to get editors and agents to go on the record, either. The reason is simple: they’re afraid of Amazon. It’s the publishers’ biggest customer, and its power keeps growing and growing. “Privately, we berate Amazon,” one publishing executive told me. “Yet we’re always trying to figure out how to work with them.” There’s also something mysterious about the industry itself, which has to do with its archaic practices and the fact that many people who are drawn to publishing aren’t interested in or informed about the details of their business. But they love to talk, and behind the fog of anonymity they educated me about their long, ambiguous, ever more painful embrace with Amazon in a way that the company, which knows all about the details of its business but as a general practice doesn’t discuss them, never really tried.